Introduction M

Introduction m The Study of Autobiography m The study of literary forms or genres is notoriously hazardous and unproductive, for as long as there are identi‹able conventions, there will be deviations, innovations, and de‹ance. In 1968 Stephen Shapiro termed autobiography the “dark continent” of literature, because it was unexplored and unyielding to theorization.1 Certainly, autobiography is no longer uncharted territory. In recent decades its study has become a veritable industry. Yet we are as far as ever from a conclusive articula- tion of this genre. Why does this seemingly futile endeavor continue to engage our critical efforts? Georg Lukács long ago pointed out the importance of the study of literary forms: “But in literature, what is truly social is form. Form is social reality; it participates vicariously in the life of the spirit. It there- fore does not operate only as a factor acting upon life and molding expe- riences, but also as a factor which is in turn molded by life.”2 In other words, as the formal postulate of the material world, a literary form is always a worldview and an ideology. Particular literary forms are results of particular social conditions, and as such, they are sociological. Franco Moretti points out that precisely because form is an ideological product, it is conservative and limiting. He terms it a “petri‹cation of life.”3 When form becomes convention, it is more effective in its organization, he argues, but it also loses its ability to change, and the pursuit of purity of form becomes a limit to creativity. 2 THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY Genre studies that aim at grouping a variety of writings under a gen- eral rubric are perhaps hard to justify. Moretti argues that behind such an effort to organize is a presupposition that “literary production takes place in obedience to a prevailing system of laws and that the task of crit- icism is precisely to show the extent of their coercive, regulating power.”4 Paradoxically, it is also through identifying the coercion of forms and critical ideologies that the process of de‹ance can be distinguished. Through writers’ attempts to break out of them, we can understand the operative constraints and all the coterminous issues, formal, social, or political, against which individual writers work. In other words the study of form is a study of antiform and, by extension, a study of resistance to the tyranny of ideological presumptions. The Modern Period m This volume is a study of modern Chinese autobiography. The idea of modernity is, needless to say, a highly contested one. Historians vari- ously identify Chinese modernity as occurring in the urban centers of the Ming dynasty, or push it back to the Southern Song, or more com- monly, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Literary scholars also more and more frequently look to the late Qing for the real stirrings of modern literature. However, in this discussion I adhere to the convention of the year 1917 as the beginning of a new era in literature. In 1917, Hu Shi published the all-important “Preliminary Proposal for the Reform of Literature” (Wenxue gailiang cuiyi), in New Youth magazine, which not only advocated the use of vernacular Chinese as the new literary medium for the masses, but also the rejection of a cultural past represented by the elitist literature in the classical language and form (wenyen wen). In 1917, the ‹rst vernacular short story, “One Day” (Yiri), was published, written by a young, little-known woman, Chen Hengzhe. The literary reform then gained momentum with Lu Xun’s “The Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji), published in 1918. The May Fourth Incident of 1919 is the political side of the new consciousness and infused the literary reform with social and nationalist urgency. The incident began as a student protest in Tiananmen Square Introduction 3 against Western and Japanese imperial ambitions in China. These ambitions were manifest in the Treaty of Versailles, which proposed to award the former German concession of Shandong Peninsula to Japan. This was further aggravated by Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, which the Chinese president, Yuan Shikai, was on the verge of accepting. Together, these would have essentially turned China into a Japanese protectorate. The anticolonial demonstration on May 4, 1919, ended in violence. Hundreds of protesters were seized. Beijing University was effectively turned into a detention center. However, when male students were placed behind bars, female students, in a de‹ning moment of Chi- nese feminism, took to the streets in place of their male compatriots. The years before and after May 4, 1919, became generally known as the May Fourth era, now used to designate the rise of both a new literature and a nationalistic consciousness among young intellectuals. As is obvious in this abbreviated description, May Fourth is a complicated movement that shuf›ed the cultural, political, and social alignments of Chinese society. My discussion unavoidably refers to “traditional society” or “the past” or “patriarchy,” in contrast to the sense of newness in the May Fourth zeitgeist. Without question, it is arbitrary to make a clear tem- poral divide between old and new. However, just as the literary language (wenyan) became an identi‹able target of attack for the May Fourth generation, all the marks of the existing dominant society became symbols of the old and outmoded. In other words, in the May Fourth context, terms such as tradition and modernity are used as dialec- tical moments, and are not necessarily descriptive of material conditions. The de‹nition of the historical past in the dialectics of social power was different for different social groups. Women’s oppression was not the same as men’s. Men suffered from certain expectations from the patriarchal society from which women were exempted. Ethnic minori- ties had their own “dominators” against which they struggled. Urban pressures were different from rural oppressions. Intellectuals suffered differently from peasants and manual laborers. This is why there are as many autobiographical strategies as there are writers. In terms of literature, “traditional” and “modern” are also not dis- crete categories. Clearly, there is no line that divides tradition and modern into two unrelated realms. There are tremendous continuities, revo- 4 THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY cations, and derivations throughout the history of Chinese literature, with each period proclaiming itself different and new. In truth, reevaluations of existing social structures are not unique to the May Fourth generation. However, the self-perception of a wholesale refutation of the past is. Frederic Jameson has argued that “emblematic breaks” are historiographic decisions.5 It is this self-perception of being distinguished from any existing social convention and institutional power that makes this generation call itself “new.” What Came Before m In order to understand the de‹ance and innovations of the May Fourth generation, it is worth a detour to an examination of the assumed tradition in autobiographical writing against which the May Fourth generation contended. Chinese biographies (zhuan) originally existed as an important section of both the dynastic histories (zhengshi) and local histories (difangzhi).6 Recognized as part of the biographical form in pre- twentieth-century Chinese letters, autobiography is manifested in short necrologies, self-prefaces, and personal annals (nianpu). It is small won- der that pre-twentieth-century Chinese autobiographies are to this day read more for their historical than for their literary value. Thus, in 1933, Mao Dun complained that “there are people who say that the Chinese are a nation with ‹ve thousand years of genealogies (jiapu). However, I have to say that the Chinese are a nation that has never developed a biographical literature (zhuanji wenxue).” He added that “although we have more than a few biographies among ancient classical works, they are only a part of the Standard Histories. The aim of such writings is to pro- vide matter for historical investigation. They did not become an independent literature.”7 It is in agreement with this opinion that Hu Shi laments the dearth of Chinese biographical literature in 1937.8 The origin of the Chinese biographical form9 has been traced to Sima Qian’s (145–85 B.C.) biographies in his Records of the Historian (Shiji), the ‹rst of the twenty-‹ve Standard Histories.10 Though Sima Qian did not write an “autobiography,” several self-re›ective pieces extant in the Shiji are paradigmatic.11 These include autobiographical references embedded in a postface and the “Letter to Ren An.” These fragmented Introduction 5 self-revelations have been referred to as “additive autobiographies.”12 In “historical biography” of imperial times, an implicit teleology often organizes the compilation of the multifarious events of a life.13 In the terminology of James Olney, traditional autobiographies place emphasis on the “bios” of the individuals rather than the “aute,” the sense of self; or the “graphe,” the individual writing style.14 In all the twenty-‹ve Histories, biographies are sorted in categories, such as loyal of‹cials, virtuous wives, ‹lial sons, and villains. These standard catego- rizations indicate thematic structures already in place in the narrative of a person’s life. These biographies entail an organization of material and events that contributes to the culminating achievement of “virtue” or “talent.” In a sense, these autobiographies or biographies are not about the particular details of one’s life but about how one arrives at a certain title or becomes an exemplary stock type.15 The historical biographical form of the Histories serves as the para- digm in the writing of both “independent biographies” and autobiographies.

Load more